sudden cold comes often not because you sat in a draught, but because, through lack of force, sent in an impatient mood from the body, there was not enough left in it to keep open the skin pores, and keep them at work expelling invisible waste matter. The pores then closed up; the waste was re-absorbed into vein and artery, which then carried death instead of life, and made you feel “half dead.” It is the exhausted body which is most liable to take cold. You could have sat in that draught without taking cold had your full force been concentrated on the body, as you had sat many a time in a similar draught without injury.
People unconsciously get so mastered by the habit of sending their force or thought away from the body on the thing to be done, or the place they want to be in, an hour hence, or a minute hence, that at last they lose the ability to fasten their thought thoroughly on any thing. That means a “scatter-brain,” or a brain so fallen into the habit of scattering its force that it can do nothing but scatter. That means a weak intellect,—not always because such an intellect as a whole is really weak, but because it has lost the power of bringing its forces together and keeping them together. It is like owning a million of dollars, scattered in ten-cent packages all over the world. Of what help to an engineer would be the steam generated in one hundred teapots? There is steam enough in them to move an engine; but how will he concentrate its force, save in one boiler? We can be as to the use we make of our thought, and the power we get out of it, either an hundred teapots, sizzling and fizzling away, and scattered over a whole town; or we can be a boiler, generating the force to do something and move something.
Lack of power to fasten thought on any thing means some of the many shades of insanity. An insane mind is a mind which has lost the power to fasten its thought on any centre or thing; or a mind which, having fastened on an idea, has lost the power to get off that idea, subject, or centre. Habitually keeping thought, or force, thrown off on the thing to be done, instead of the thing we are now doing, leads to both forms of mental derangement. A strong mind, which can mass its forces, cultivates power to forget, for the time, what may trouble, through concentrating on what may please and profit it and others. Example: If I grieve day after day over a departed friend, I hurt myself. I expend so much force on tears and sad thoughts, I hurt also my friend; because, in so directing my mind upon him, I send him a current of gloomy thought, which depresses and worries. He in turn, so oppressed, is the more liable to send the same thought to others, and oppress them. It matters not whether the friend so grieved for, and so injured, be in a seen or unseen existence. The results are the same.
If, unconsciously, you cultivate any of these moods which send the spirit, or force, from the body, you will have, by degrees, less and less of the spirit able to act on the body; and the less of your invisible self you have so to act, the less strength of any sort will you have. A person habitually timid may live with half or more of his real self, and the better half, too, entirely unable to make the body act up to its higher, or more courageous, resolve or thought; because the body grows, and adapts itself in shape and movement and manner of movement in accordance with the order of thought most acting upon it. So a mind having plenty of courage, but which has habitually and ignorantly cultivated timidity, may not at first be able physically to express courage, so great is the power accumulated by the body so trained to the habit of timidity by the mind.
That, also, is a species of mental intemperance, which cannot sit still,—which keeps feet patting on the floor, or legs swinging, or fingers drumming. You expend thought in these acts; you expend force: you have so much the less force to use. You weaken yourself in every way by these movements, which you may have for years unconsciously cultivated, until it becomes a habit difficult to break off. You are then walking without getting anywhere. You are-actually working without accomplishing any thing. You will commence the control of your mind, and the preservation of your force for doing something, by keeping your limbs quiet and stopping this waste. You will sleep far better when you have stopped this mental and muscle jigging; for the mind does carry this pernicious habit to bed with it, and there through long habit keeps the body tossing and turning, so preventing the spirit from detaching most of itself from the body, as the spirit must do to give the body sound, healthy sleep. And, when you have conquered this habit, you have made a great stride toward the power of dismissing any train of thought, or of switching your thought from one train or track to another: for the balanced and powerful mind is a system of departments, and has the power at any time to close one department or workshop, forget all about it temporarily in a few minutes, and throw all its force in another; and, when it does this, the department that is closed not only rests, but recuperates and repairs itself.
There are other rests, both for mind and body, besides sleep; and in more advanced and cultivated stages of existence you will rest in change of occupation, and the physical and mental strength you can gain here through cultivating repose; or, in other words, keeping your thought under control has no limit. As you cultivate this control or repose; you will have continual gain of strength; and, if you do not cultivate it, you will have continual loss; for “to him that hath shall be given, and to him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
III.
THE LAW OF MARRIAGE.
Thoughts are Things.
The refining element in nature is feminine. The greater constructive force in nature is masculine. The clearer-seeing element in nature is feminine. The ability to do what the feminine force or mind sees is the fit thing to do, is masculine. Woman can best see how effort on the rougher stratum of life should be done. Man is best fitted to do on that cruder stratum, because the masculine or relatively cruder organization is best fitted to work on that stratum. Woman’s spiritual eye always sees farther than man’s. Man’s spiritual hand, or force, has more power to do what the feminine eye sees should be done. Woman’s spiritual eye, or intuition, is always opened in advance of man’s. For this reason, there are far more clairvoyants among women than men. For this reason, women are the first to apprehend all new revelation. In the truths which are forcing themselves into notice to-day, there are many more intelligent feminine believers than of the other sex. For this reason the most faithful followers of Christ were women. For this reason it has become almost an adage that woman “jumps at correct conclusions,” because her capacity of foretelling results in business, of warning man whom to trust and whom not to trust,—in other words, her sense of feeling the truth,—is keener than that of man’s, on the same principle, and by the same law applied in another direction, that the more delicately adjusted meteorological instrument will be the most sensitive to varying conditions of the air, and therefore give notice of coming changes. For this reason have women been the most devout and persistent in religious observance,— because the Church has held and does hold to-day the clews which shall yet weld together in a consistent whole what men call science and what they call religion. It has been woman’s spiritual eye which has caught the glimmerings of these truths; perverted, distorted, misinterpreted, and misapplied as they have been, not through any fault of the truth, but through the blindness of the eyes, which it is the office of that truth eventually to make clear.
Woman’s clearer sight will, in all stages of growth and existence, be clearer than man’s; and man will always have the most power to carry out the idea for which he is indebted to woman. And for every man’s peculiar power, there can be but one feminine clear-seeing eye or mind to tell him where and how to use that power; and the feminine eye is predestined for the masculine constructive hand, and only for that hand; and when the two come together and work together, as ultimately they must, there is the true marriage.
The feminine force or mind is a necessary and inevitable part of the masculine force or mind. In other realms of existence where these two, the masculine and feminine, in the shape of one man and one woman, understand their true relationship to each other, and live up to that relationship, there are powers to each coming of the union of these two spirits, that our relatively weak human imaginations
